Review: Demos, The Enemy Within (2008)

The Enemy Within: A Short History of Witch-Hunting by John Putnam Demos

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


John Demos is one of my favorite historians, and I will read pretty much anything by him I can find. This is, as the subtitle says, "a brief history of witch-hunting," starting with the Martyrs of Lyons in A.D. 177 and ending with the Fells Acre Day School child abuse panic in 1984. Demos does a great job of synthesizing a LOT of material and combing out the commonalities between, say, the Malleus Maleficarum and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But I'm left wondering uneasily when the next witch-hunt will come along, or if Twitter and other social media make the half-life of a witch-hunt so brief that they're blossoming and dying all the time now.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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